KASHUA, Sayed << back to list Sayed Kashua is a writer, journalist, and T.V. critic. He writes a weekly column for Ha’aretz newspaper and written a television satiric sitcom for the Israeli Television. Sayed Kashua is the recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Award for First Novel 2004 (Italy), The Prime Minister’s Prize 2005 (Israel) and the Lessing Prize for Critic 2006 (Germany). (photo © Dan Porges) Bibliography & Foreign sales LET IT BE MORNING (Fiction) 2004 After a series of disappointments in the Jewish city where he lives, the hero, an Arab journalist, returns to the village of his birth in order to rebuild his life with his wife and daughter. To his amazement he discovers that Arab society has completely changed and that he finds himself unable to avoid confrontations with its new order and customs. One morning the Israeli Army enforces a total curfew for no apparent reason and the hero and his family have to decide what it means to be human beings in an obviously inhuman situation. In LET IT BE MORNING, Sayed Kashua looks on Arab society within the Green Line with a very realistic and impartial eye, examining its identity, ideas and the radical changes that had occurred in its relations to the state of Israel. LET IT BE MORNING is not a political book but a novel about people who live in an impossible era with all the sorrow, joy of life, laughter and pain, cruelty and compassion that these times bring with them. Sayed Kashua tells their story in an amusing and heartwarming manner. Rights sold to: USA, Grove/Atlantic; UK, Atlantic Books; Holland, Vassallucci; France, Editions Olivier; Italy, Guanda; Germany, Berlin Verlag; Israel, Keter Reviews ”Let It Be Morning offers a riveting study of human values collapsing under inhuman conditions…” Guardian ”Kashua’s story is justifiably overwrought and claustrophobic…Kashua, himself an Arab journalist working in Israel, explores the unenviable status of Arab Israelis.” Financial Times ”…a provocative and memorable novel… Mr. Kashua’s pacy narrative keeps the story moving to a clever and blackly humorous climax.” Economist ”Let It Be Morning is not only a revealing exploration of the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel, but also a thumping good yarn…Kashua juxtaposes the story of a loving father who wants to save his family against a background of increasingly absurdist politics, with a final ironic denouement which turns everything upside down.” The Big Issue – London ”Sayed Kashua belongs to the new generation of writers who refuse to be a mouthpiece for any ideology.” Pages des libraires ”Sayed Kashua illustrates impressively the dilemma between loyalty, disappointment and fear of Israeli Palestinians. He depicts artfully simple how history prevents human beings to develop an autonomous personality.” Neue Zuericher Zeitung ”A tense and uneasy novel that pulls the reader along to a foreign land.” Frankfurter Rundschau “One of the most potent and impressive novels that have been written in Hebrew in the last several years.” Ha’aretz “If you read just two books a year, LET IT BE MORNING should be one of them.” Israel Radio DANCING ARABS (Fiction) 2002 Sayed Kashua gives Israeli literature one of its most moving moments: a hero who is totally Palestinian and equally Israeli; entirely Hebrew and entirely Arab; raised in an Arab village and growing up in a Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem, a city both liberated and occupied. Along the way, the hero meanders between two strong women, one called “grandma”, the other “my wife”. Each one teaches him a chapter in love, loyalty, and honesty. They are the anchor that allows him to run from himself, to follow his passions, and most important, to practice his most unusual talent - “to disappear” - the talent that allows him to unveil and to map out the cracks in his soul, and the wild void in the heart of Israeli society. This is Sayed Kashua’s first novel. Recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Award 2004 for First Novel (Italy). Rights sold to: USA, Grove Atlantic, Inc; Holland, Vassallucci; France, Belfond; Germany, Berlin Verlag; Italy, Guanda; Spain, Ediciones Tropismos; Poland, Fundacja Pogranicze; Indonesia, Serambi; Vietnam, Domino Publishers; Israel, Modan Publishers Dramatic Rights: Forma International, Italy Reviews ”Gritty and agile...On any given day, Kashua’s narrator may daydream of becoming the first Arab prime minister, bringing ’peace and love to the region,’ or embracing militant Islam and blowing up Israeli soldiers at a local intersection--only to do neither. As a portrait of a young man’s drift into emotional no man’s land, this novel has the feel of grim truth.”--The New York Times Book Review “I think it is an amazing work of fiction. It has integrity and beauty. It rises above the polemics of that searing conflict and renders the life of that land with a touch of humanity.” Fouad Ajami ”Kashua goes beyond the front-page headlines and horrific newspaper photos of Middle East violence to show a different view of what being an Arab is all about.”--The San Francisco Chronicle ”Sayed Kashua’s affecting...debut novel...evokes the conditions, political and personal, that forge his narrator’s disaffected identity...Kashua can be equally unsparing when it comes to the anti-semitism that pervades the Muslim community and the inequities that plague Arab Israeli culture...[and] succeeds admirably in creating a protagonist adrift between two worlds, neither of which, tragically, can sustain him.”--The Miami Herald ”An impressive debut novel...[that] stares unflinchingly at the many ugly realities on both sides of an eternal national crisis, and the result is a bracingly candid lamentation.”--The Baltimore Sun “Sayed Kashua’s frankness and his detailed descriptions give the book the dimensions of a striking satire.” Die Welt “Kashua elevates his dancing Arabs into symbols of his won existence: a life between, where everybody dances with himself.” Die Tageszeitung “…captivating … Sayed Kashua delivers a testimony of an Israeli society plagued by prejudice…” Le Monde des Livres “…a shocking book … a novel without complacency or wordiness narrate the hell of anguished cohabitation and prejudice that foment fears.” La Liberte